Sonya Lindfors: It is people who need protection, not artists

Sonya Lindfors, choreographer and artistic director, continues her diverse activities to tackle the violent experience of othering and racialisation. Lindfors’s work has already had an impact on the closed spheres of discourse and thought in Finnish dance and performance culture. Lindfors received the Theatre Info Finland Award 2017 for these achievements.

#StopHatredNow, an event platform that is currently being organized by many participants, is creating practical tools and tackling racialization, cultural monopolization and othering. Lindfors’s Noble Savage will be performed at the Tampere Theatre Festival.

Finland was a country with closed structures, racialisation and cultural monopolisation – a breeding ground for all kinds of thoughts on otherness. However, something has changed in recent years. What is this? What has Lindfors been doing and working on?

“People come first”

“I am interested in the whole ‘art comes first’ and ‘art is sacred’ and ‘artists are good people’ discourse, where art, without question, goes before everything else. It is hard to get to grips with the structures or to even be able to discuss them, as artists are already guilty of being violent towards themselves in the name of art. I want to break the reel where artists believe ‘I am a good person’, as if artists are automatically always ethical.

“I want to break down so-called neutralities. This type of artist image is not an actual state that has been around since the dawn of time.

“Why do artists need protection? Isn’t it more important to protect people? People come first! I am more interested in people. I am glad to say I am a bad artist.

“I always want to return to the concrete level, the everyday life of art and the life that we live. I try to deal with the question of being able to live side by side and in equality and the things we need to do to achieve a state where we can actually stand each other. I think art should deal with these primary questions far more.”

Butler meets the essence of blackness and whiteness

In her piece that will be completed in 2018, Sonya Lindfors is considering the essence of blackness and whiteness.

“Michael Jackson was able to go from blackness to whiteness and get to its essence. I am trying to work out whether Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity can also be used to bring out the fact that skin colour is not just an essence but an ideological matrix. This naturally interests me as I inhabit blackness and whiteness. Is it always necessary for us to understand the world through interfaces and negations and, in this way, enforce dichotomies that rule each other out?”

Lindfors believes there should be many tools for the problems of representation, for example. Would it be possible to utopianise and see blackness and whiteness as gradual shifts, variations of the same colour, in the same way that there used to be six genders?

“We need to be able to see behind our constructed thought and classification systems and deal with the big structural problems affecting Western art traditions. The Western art canon already contains a huge amount of cultural monopolisation. We continue to forge ahead on this basis and the discourse ends with the freedom of art. Art is related to the experience of its sanctity and protected nature. We assume art is sacred or neutral and we assume it needs protection.”

“We need workshops, training rings and other arenas where we can carry out the discourse. At UrbanApa we have developed a procedure where we first state the framework, for instance, that the piece we are working on is ‘anti-misogynistic’, ‘anti-homophobic’, etc, and then we negotiate with artists. Sometimes an artist may not want to get involved. It is a bit like a checklist. If you want to work on an anti-racist project then you should go through these questions, check, check, check…”

This is not unreasonable

“There is no way back. As unpleasant as it is for all of us, the diversification of the world makes things more complicated. We need to renegotiate things. These questions are not inert lumps. This also inevitably means that we will make mistakes, but our attitude should, at least, change to one of ‘I don’t know much about this and I am always going to make mistakes’ from our self-righteous ‘I am an artist and I always mean good’”.

It is not unreasonable that with this pretty much completely white ball, an artist might have to give away one cake from his 500 cakes.

Sonya Lindfors was interviewed by Hanna Helavuori.

Picture: Noble Savage (c) Sanna Käsmä / Tampereen Teatterikesä